> The concern is valid. But there’s a deeper worry, one that involves the enlargement not of our gullibility but of our cynicism. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has voic

> The concern is valid. But there’s a deeper worry, one that involves the enlargement not of our gullibility but of our cynicism. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has voiced worries about the use of AI to influence elections, but he says the threat will go away once “everyone gets used to it.” > Some experts believe the opposite is true: The risks will grow as we acclimate ourselves to the presence of deepfakes. Once we take the counterfeits for granted, we may begin doubting the veracity of all the information presented to us through media. We may, in the words of the mathematics professor and deepfake authority Noah Giansiracusa, start to “doubt reality itself.” We’ll go from a world where our bias was to take everything as evidence to one where our bias is to take nothing as evidence. It is journalistic malpractice that these viewpoints are presented as though the former has anything to actually say. Of course Altman says it's no big deal, he's selling the fucking things. He is not an engineer, he is not a sociologist, he is not an expert at anything except some vague notion of businessness. Why is his opinion next to an expert's, even setting aside his flagrant and massive bias in the discussion at hand!? "The owner of the orphan crushing machine says it'll be fine once we adjust to the sound of the orphans being crushed." > “Every expert I spoke with,” reports an Atlantic writer, “said it’s a matter of when, not if, we reach a deepfake inflection point, after which forged videos and audio spreading false information will flood the internet.” Depending where you go this is already true. Facebook is absolutely saturated in the shit. I have to constantly mute accounts and "show less like" on BlueSky posts because it's just AI generated allegedly attractive women (I personally prefer the ones that look... well, human, but that's just me). Every online art community either is trying to remove the AI garbage or has just given up and categorized it, asking users uploading it to please tag it so their other users who don't want to see it can mute it, and of course they don't because AI people are lazy. Also I'd be remiss to not point out that this is, yet again, something I and many many others predicted back when this shit started getting going properly, and waddaya know. That said, to be honest, I'm not that worried about the political angle. The politics of fakery, deep or otherwise, has always meant it's highly believable and consumable for the audience it's intended for because it's basically an amped-up version of political cartoons. Conservatives don't need their "Obama is destroying America!" images to be photorealistic to believe them, they just need them to stroke their confirmation bias. They're fine believing it even if it's flagrantly fake.